A Conversation Between Iain McGilchrist and David Bentley Hart

you are Ian mcgilchrist scientist man of letters raconteur never aspired to the last of these well if nothing else um uh your books are extraordinarily readable uh I mean the the very hard to put down and they're very big uh you know this of course the master in his emissary um yeah so yeah apparently I saw I also have the sort of thing ways of attending but the the the the the real uh I think um occasion of the conversation is the massive let me get this right [Music] the matter with things yes that's irrecent that's true I take it you would regard as your your magnum opus maybe your maximum Opus um it will be because I doubt I'm going to write anything long ever again so I and I feel like I covered what I really wanted to say in it so well you covered a great deal I mean I have to say I I uh we'll talk about it in a moment but actually I was uh especially enthralled by the second volume the second half mostly because it covered because it touched on so many fields um that I've been working in or so many questions I've been addressing in fact in the book I'm finishing up for Yale just now and uh I have to confess to a deep sympathy overall for the conclusions you reach so so yes what is the book that you're doing for Yale called the funny thing is I I keep changing the title I can tell you it's all philosophy of mine it um started years ago then it was interrupted by two different contingencies the second of which was the uh covered shutdown so I'm finishing up I have a long suffering editor but it's but um that uh I mean putatively on the philosophy of mind it also goes beyond that to say you really can't have the the the uh anglophone analytic tendency to think of Mind as a a question that somehow can be separated from the question of the structure of life and of end of the sort of transcendental premises of any Act of Consciousness and so on and so forth doesn't appeal to me the overall project I think the way I would I would describe it is to argue that mind life and language are all one and the same uh there are all manifestations of one in the same irreducible reality which is the ground so to speak or the source of all other realities um yes which brings me to you no all I was going to say is that um the last part of the matter with things which is the sectional ontology um I think I'm arguing well I am arguing the Consciousness and matter although distinguishable very clearly and having different properties uh aspects of one in the same thing and that all of this is shot through with we're the whole of the universe is shot through with consciousness uh and and could be said to be made of Consciousness I believe so that when we come to look at things like purposes and and value that these are also aspects of this same thing so that the business of experience of life and of Mind as you were saying uh damage if they're Phyllis is out too far from one another I'm all in favor of making um distinctions but I'm not in favor of making divisions that are insuperable right and of course that's been the history of the philosophy of mind or the question of Consciousness especially but not not exclusively in the anglophone world ever since the uh the rise the mechanical philosophy which even if it's you know no longer functional as as a scientific Paradigm to core remains a kind of tacit metaphysics the the demands that we draw divisions precisely where the divisions are as you say in super but once they're drawn they create not not so much a difficulty to be negotiated or not even just Paradox but really a plain contradiction I mean I think once you've reduced matter to Pure mechanism and mind whether you're a Cartesian or someone who's trying to reduce mind to the mechanism despite the you know evident phenomenological difference of what mind does from what a mechanism does uh you've just created an impossible problem and it's only um I I think fogma that that binds us but we're getting ahead of ourselves I was actually I was going to get into it but but no no I mean I was that that the latter part of your book coincided so nicely with with not just the work I'm doing but the way I think about it and of course you're drawing on much of the same um for instance in the realm of of um evolutionary and molecular biology and cell biology I mean the the sort of changes that have been taking place in the Life Sciences I think at least since the time of Barbara mcclintock's experiments uh discover of transposable elements and the things we've discovered about about the cells power of editing its own genome and all that but but of course what people if they know anything about your work at all but haven't really read deeply in it especially if they haven't read this book they'll know that that the question the sort of the the place where your your Explorations begin and in a sense end there but end there after making a very uh you know large Voyage right has a great sort of odyssey-like feel of it you go far afield and you come back at the last but but it has to do with the two hemispheres of the brain not in a reductive uh physicalist sense I mean you're not you're not it's not um but it is a very rich exploration of that first and foremost and I was again just for those who are unfamiliar with your work it seems like the place to start I mean um yes how do you characterize yeah how do you characterize the basic shape of your work there and what you discovered I know it's yes yes well a couple of caveats I mean one is that I don't as you I want to I want to underline what you said that not in a reductionist sense I'm not suggesting that the brain gives rise to Consciousness but it has some close relationship with our experience that is for certain and um since the two hemispheres of the brain see the world attend to the world and find in the world something different each having its own Take On The World if you like this is important important for philosophy apart from anything else the other caveat is just to say that if you don't know my work and you haven't read it you must put out of your mind absolutely everything you think you know about hemisphere differences um I I have my first job is always to clear the decks of a lot of misconceptions and one of the misconceptions is that because there have been many misconceptions about hemisphere difference in the past the whole subject is a non-subject and not worth approaching so just because we made some rather um necessarily broad brush and preliminary distinctions between the hemispheres and almost inevitably got them wrong doesn't mean that there are no differences so it's quite different to say that what went into pop psychology about the hemisphere differences it is wrong and to claim that there's nothing there that the very very much is and that's what I've worked on for at least 30 years so um for example the it's not true that the left hemisphere alone deals with language or or Reason nor is it true that the right hemisphere alone deals with emotion and the Visio spatial each is involved in just about everything but in a characteristically different way and this is based on the way in which each hemisphere pays attention so I say attention is a moral act because attention changes what you find in the world and in a way which would take us a bit of an unpacking but maybe you need to get actually changes what there is in the cosmos so we are at some very low level in agreement there right well I'm I'm very glad we are in some way involved in the process of creation we're not just um passive um recorders or photographic plates or whatever but how we respond to the world changes it and changes us um for better or worse and so all the time what we're thinking what we're seeing how we're attending how we're thinking makes a difference what there is and so it seemed to be pretty important topic and let me just very quickly give a sort of thumbnail sketch of why these two kinds of attention grew up and what they lead to in terms of the way they see the world um they I believe stem from a a difficulty a profound difficulty which every living creature must encounter if it's to stay alive and interestingly all the brains that we've looked at are divided and asymmetrical like the human brain it's not just something that happened later in evolution and even the origins of brains at all the first neural network in a sea creature called Nemesis 700 million years old is already asymmetrical what's that about it seems to me and nobody has suggested um any hypothesis that seems to me to explain so much that we need to pay attention to the world in two ways at the same time and that would be an impossibility with just one network that could be disposed towards the world we need to and what are those two different ways one is to pay the clearest sharpest most narrowly targeted attention to a detail to enable us to pick it up accurately and swiftly that is how we feed that's how we get things to make ourselves shelter or whatever it may be to utilize the world but if that's the only attention we're paying we will be extremely vulnerable we won't last long at all because we need to be paying the exact opposite kind of attention at the same time which is a broad open sustained Vigilant attention without any preconception as to what one might find around one an enemy one's mate one's Offspring Etc but all this needs to be seen and observed so what this means is one kind of attention this piecemeal targeted at a fragment and trying to pin it down and the other is a kind of open continuous sustaining of the conceptual and the preconceptual field of us Consciousness and and in very short um short way of putting it I say that the left hemisphere whose Target is to help manipulate the world she is little tiny fragments that are separate from one another static decontextualized disembodied and from which we are separate and in which essentially what you're looking at is an abstraction and a generality it very quickly says it's one of those and puts it into a category the right hemisphere meanwhile sees everything as individual and unique it sees there are patterns of course otherwise it wouldn't be able to work but it sees these patterns as composed not of single entities that need to be connected but of flowing Connections in which everything is ultimately connected with everything else where context makes a huge difference of what it is one is dealing with um in fact it can completely reverse the meaning of what one is looking at um where the many things have to remain implicit not explicit as the left hemisphere insists uh where shaded judgments nuances the bringing together of 15 different possibilities have to be um made possible whereas in the left hemisphere it's got to be quick dirty black and white either it's this or it's that and this world is animate whereas the left hemisphere's world is inanimate essentially there are glosses to be made on that but it wouldn't be too far wrong to say that and the most important difference is that the right hemisphere sees things as they presence to us as they come into being through the acts of our attending to them for us and the left hemisphere she's only representations which means literally present again when in fact whatever it is is no longer present so it's it's actually a falsehood an approximate one a very rough one much as a diagram or a map or a theory is fairly simple jejun skeletal compared with the world that it Maps or has a theory about and so you've got this one world where things are infinitely complex beautiful Rich flowing changing and living and this other word made up of bits and pieces that we ordered in a certain way in order to use it and that enormously um quick and dirty of me to put a taste out but it it sets the background and if you want to know the refinements then please read what I've written well actually I'm impressed that you were you you've obviously gotten in the habit of explaining yourself uh by now with a certain economy because I couldn't uh condensed it all to that too I mean the thing that uh fascinates me first of all I should point out that uh this is the both these books are deeply grounded in um the science I want to make sure people understand this that the the the it's not simply a speculative um consideration of the difference of the hemisphere it begins with hard clinical data uh quite a lot of it and and it's I don't think anyone before you has gone to the trouble of really coordinating so much of it with such richness I mean to be honest I think Nancy I'm sorry no no no uh I think that's right I mean in the first book I refer to about two and a half thousand pieces of evidence and then the later booked five and a half thousand pieces of evidence but sorry so it is very grounded in in in empirical science yeah you know and and and uh and all the fascinating action but let's be honest before these books appeared most of the material uh as you say on on the two hemispheres was sort of popularized notion uh that made uh not the sort of distinctions you've made exactly but just of a hard and fast divisions almost between two different kinds uh absolutely different unrelated kinds of subjectivity or or affect or mood that was about it or before that of course Julian James you know trying to show her Consciousness emerge from a kind of unconsciousness communication between the hemispheres which has a kind of crude value to it as a first speculative step it seems to me only in recognizing uh that that at times what we we think of as conscious and unconscious as directed and directing um probably shouldn't be put in that way but also I think the argument falls apart obviously at many places because it's oversimplifications but also certain implaus abilities in it whereas yeah your books are not so I mean the the to my mind um establish a new standard for talking about these things it was interesting to me when you talk about representation and presentation of course because this is an ancient issue uh or an ancient and modern issue in epistemology the degree to which we we think of our knowledge our communication or our communion with the world as presentation or representation um you know we have the antique model of the notion that so the the object of attention the object of consciousness and the mind can under in their diverse modes participate in a single form so that uh in that sense what what when the mind is open to the world what it's knowing really is the world and what is out there dwells within us under a different modality and then of course but but the modern premise the the to which we uh you know to which so much analytic philosophy recurs almost as a given is that knowledge is mere representation that that it consists in um a sort of symbolic transcription of sense data into a sort of um uh representational allegory which is then composed not really composed intentionally because intentionality itself in this picture tends to disappear almost altogether uh but is it but simply as a kind of um uh uh neurological transcription all the way down that arrives at a kind of subjectivity if at all in a Cartesian sense and that there's some sort of but but in the picture that emerges from your book which is so much more interesting to me is the the that there is a representational function there I mean that you associate more with the left hemisphere but it it it it functions properly within the context of this the this ability also intentional intentional attentional ability uh to participate I mean the the knowledge really is as far as uh let's say the right hemisphere again I'm trying not to break it down too simply but but that but as presentation as participation and it's actually yes all I was going to say the the representation the representational process uh has a purpose but but uh it's it's purpose oh I'll let you go ahead yes well I was just thinking how John Archibald reload a great physicist said we live in a participatory Universe um which is a very very brief um remark but contains a great deal of wisdom I think one of the reasons I used the word presencing I mean it is a translation from Heidegger's German yeah yes and reason and he actually invented the verb and reason from the noun and reason and so we did too and said these presence why I like that distinction there's a presentation again seems like it could be um rather first of all more separate from reality and perhaps more static and cerebral um and that should be left for the representation whereas what I'm saying about the presence is that as you were putting it I thought very beautifully that we are actually partaking in that reality we're helping to create it and our knowledge of the world is partial of course but not partially in the way that it's often thought of nowadays by philosophers and psychologists indeed by most people in this area what I'm getting at is that the partial nature of our knowledge is because we can only know things from the perspective of Who We Are although we can do things to enlarge that perspective as much as possible but we go all the way to reality when we perceive things when we attend them and when we are present with them we are experiencing something real not a representation and that that is the distinction because quite a lot of people know um think somehow that they've that they may have got over the Cartesian Problem by actually intensifying it and talking about us only able to read out from a bank of dials a reality a version of reality but it's not the instrument panel that we are seeing as they wear closed off hermetically in some windowless cell in the brain we aren't actually making contact with whatever it is we mean by reality don't just make it up yeah well I mean of course um the way the uh the older physicalist project even before people were floating Notions of a more materialist really understanding of pan psychism but the way the for the physicalist project has evolved probably has a kind of um [Music] perfect expression in the work of Daniel Dennett right in the sense that these the entire we don't participate in the world we don't even participate in ourselves our own Consciousness is itself only a representation so to speak to I don't know what I mean I'm not quite sure I've never been quite sure uh to whom the illusion Consciousness appears if not a conscious subject but but exactly that for um then if there is simply a countless number of neurophysiological events that that are themselves uh sort of sort of judgments that are passed by our physiology you know not not by our attending minds and these uh also these once one undertakes what he calls a homuncular decomposition because of course as with most modern anglophone philosophers he understands the options to be only Cartesian dualism or materialist reduction of some kind um you know maybe pan psychism but even then pan psychism understood as as a materialist project primarily not not in its fullest sort of classical sense and these multiple drafts uh Vie with one another and then among at any given moment this or that representational process achieves a kind of celebrity a kind of Fame in the brain as he called it that somehow makes that makes it seem like the dominant and direct apprehension of reality out there and then the notion that this is a continuous Act of Consciousness is therefore narrative fiction that we impose on it afterwards or posteriorly or in the act itself again all of which is very curious because it you know it's denying the reality of intentionality denying the reality of the unity of apprehension denying the reality of Consciousness and yet seems to be relying on all of those things uh tacitly to explain but anyway yeah the point is you're absolutely right in that in that the uh the if not reduxio and absurdum uh at least the reduction to the inevitable Terminus of this sort of reasoning you find there which we never we've achieved an absolute absence of of communion with reality you know the the it turns out that that the rationalist project regarding Consciousness as it's understood especially in the English-speaking World taken to that extreme becomes a kind of epistemological nihilism uh and it's very curious I mean I um I'm not I mean it's curious in in part because of the incoherences and the arguments which one can find if one has the patience for them fairly easily but also the the appeal of it is is I have to admit uh Curious to me the notion that one would want this to be so which is very much the case with that you know yeah it is it is it is I mean for one thing of course it would make the whole business of both science and philosophy somewhat pointless in that we can't get anywhere near to anything that matters or is real or we're dealing with is a fantasy not even something in Consciousness and the idea that there is scientific truth is a terribly interesting idea I believe there is I believe that science can help us find that truth although I also think that there are certain kinds of truths that science is is too limited to be able to to help with but I believe that truth is the aim of science but I don't know why somebody who believes that all there is is a pointless heap of material with no valuable purpose attached to it crashing around and the space whatever that space is why would they care what was true wouldn't it be better to care only what is comfortable if somebody believes that there's a God and that gives them a comfort who are they to say my truth is more important than your comfort I mean I I would say that because I think that you know truth is of ultimate importance but I can't see why they would well the entire uh I mean the the this this um reminds me of a a very bad book that uh um I read recently and well not all that recently as a few years ago I can't even remember the Martin Eggland I think um you know arguing why for um a commitment to uh to uh the sort of socialism without Reserve but a commitment that required us to uh shed any expectation of of a Transcendent realm of meaning of Truth or reality because according to him this distracts us from the from the projects of this world which seemed to be very curious in verse first of all just of the evidence on the ground I mean he was talking about a moral commitment at that point and I think anyone who's actually spent time among those who are suffering uh genuine uh penury or illness find the the the agents the agencies and the people there that have come to help curiously enough or preponderingly from religious backgrounds so obviously seeing things in the light of Eternity doesn't doesn't make you indifferent to this life but then again this one was Swedish and I'm trying to explain religion to a Swede is kind of like trying to make a spatula appreciate Bach it's just it's very difficult but um but as always said though it is it is a curious thing because he doesn't say this I had a lovely conversation yesterday with my Swedish publisher I know you are I have many Swedish friends well I have about five years I know um yeah but you you know that that in Sweden as is occasionally as is true in France as well there is a sometimes overly proud tendency towards layacism um but uh anyway I'm getting terrifically off track it is it is true the the case that I've never quite understood the moral imperative but I think actually in the case of someone like Dannon or pancreas there's very little in the way of moral pathos there anyway it really is simply uh an argument for seeing a world in a way he prefers to see it which does make one which does raise a question about about your book you know about um you know the degree to which intentionality are not not necessarily or attention I mean the question is who's the agent I mean one thing also that people need them says you don't suggest that each hemisphere is simply or the brain is the agency of consciousness um or is the agent and it it's obviously we think we we are embedded in the world we we negotiate reality through and by this uh this living organism which the brain is uh obvious but but you're not it's it's not a reduction to well the left hemisphere thinks this the right hemisphere thinks that and then they get together and and you know there is a there is a deeper agency there but the question is how the degree to which at some level intentionally we can determine how we Orient ourselves to the world in regard to these capacities um because no go ahead no well one of the first things to remember is that approximately 99.5 of all that we are aware of and used to guide us in our lives is not in the focus of Consciousness it's not something we are directly immediately conscious of most of everything is going on outside of the conscious and one way of looking at it is that that kind of um self-aware awareness is something that needs to be brought in to solve particular problems and fixes on something while we are cheating it as a problem but everything else is going on around us and is being considered in different ways by our embodied cells so of course it's not that just one hemisphere thinks all this other hemisphere thing we think as a whole I have found myself having to use shorthands in talking about the two hemispheres which people sometimes object to as though they are people because they're facets of people they get involved in facets of our experience but it's much better than talking about them as machines which is the only other alternative um because they are they do help shape Consciousness and uh intimately related to what we intend and attend to as you say right the question of why somebody like Dan Dennett finds this way of thinking through difficult and it's I mean perhaps it's unfair of me to come sort of psychiatrist but it isn't um a well-known fact that um Engineers are far over represented amongst religious fundamentalists and indeed among fundamentalists of any kind and I see certain figures too well known for us to need to mention them right now um who are fundamentalists atheists as effectively having this same um dogmatic stance and oddly enough Daniel Bennett says in one of his essays if I hadn't been a philosopher I'd have been an engineer yeah no that's true and and I don't think you you don't have to play psychologists here because many of these are perfectly open as to their motive so um another yeah a philosopher who who wrote a book called The Atheist guide to reality Alex Rosenberg about 12 years ago um speaks of scientism and and uses it just as one might appropriously saying you know is you know someone who has a dogmatic belief that physics yes is all real facts but he adopts it as his Creed and clings to it with a rare Fidelity I have to say I mean more than I I would have for anything because because he's able to to abide contradictions that some of us would find Soul crushing you know he uh at one point makes a very long argument to the effect that uh intrinsic intentionality isn't possible for a physical uh organism and that um you know we seem to have intrinsic intentionality of the sort that would allow you to write a book and denying its existence um the uh endpoint in fact it cannot be so because that would be a reality that would not be fixed by the facts of physics and the facts of physics everything plate the circularity is Sublime I mean it is a kind of mysticism almost that I I could almost admire but the question but the reason I bring the question up when I talk about intentionality uh I mean one of the more mysterious aspects of of of mental agency is the inseparability of intentionality and Consciousness I think I mean many analytic philosophers try to divide them you know intentionality what we think of as intentionality is merely function and that's a function that requires no consciousness even if at times consciousness is one of the functional tokens used by the process you know again you know it becomes an odd inversion in which you're presuming the very thing you're denying in order to make sense of what you're affirming um but in in this case um you know intentionality not only requires attentiveness that is we're more conscious of something the more we attend to it intentionally and attend things more acutely the to the you know more and more to the degree that we're conscious of them there's there's an inseparability there just as both are inseparable from from a kind of unity of apprehension that allows that to be a single act uh it's a button intention can determine how we see it so I would say almost only how how we arrange the dominant testimony of the hemisphere so to speak uh there's one thing one I mean whereas I don't give much Credence to uh to then it's picture of the sort of internal hetero phenomenological reporting in which uh we think we're conscious because we tell ourselves we are which again to me is is gibberish but he is right I think in saying that the the that there is um you know we do have is not something we consciously can drive but nonetheless lies at at the level probably of habitus the way in which we interpret reality uh you know determines where we in a sense dwell in our own brains you know someone like Dennis very sincerely could very sincerely believe that it makes sense to say that Consciousness is an illusion because so intently so to speak does he dwell in that sort of left hemispheric representational model of reality that he's able somehow to crowd out the the sort of over well you would think is the overwhelming immediacy of that apprehension of reality the the the the the the the Consciousness is and so there is this intentional I I think this capacity as you say we make the reality and and in many ways and I agree and not just and not just again I have to point this out to be not just representationally that's not what you're saying you're not saying that we make our picture of the world alone I mean the the reality we have it really is a participatory Act of consciousness but that we dwell in different worlds to the degree the the that at some level this happens US in US of how we live in our and and I think that your book is also both the books but the second one is specially makes it very plausible to me it makes me understand first of all certain kinds of analytic philosophy you know why that I find particularly sterile and self-refuting but then others but also someone liked it but but also I don't know how to put an epochs of the spirit to sound a bit Shilling in since you quote Charlie a lot um yes in that in the this sort of intentionality can become a habit not just of individuals but a cultural habit yes yes and and and and and so there's a sense all of us who've who've arrived at this point late in modernity yes have had indurated in Us inculcated in this either just through tuition or through some participation of all Consciousness in its own history you know I'm quite open to that notion as well a way of seeing reality that I think is and as you say is incredibly destructive too um yes there's a lot there I mean I just first to get get the the then it point out of the way as as um has been pointed out by Galen stores and no doubt for many others when it comes to Consciousness you can't open the seams is Gap if there seems to be Consciousness then there is consciousness yeah so um yeah yeah and that Consciousness is always intentional as you say the Consciousness is not con we're always conscious of something and what we're conscious of will be the result of a whole range of things exigences thoughts values purposes many of which and are not ever explicit or any occasionally explicit but I think that we're therefore if you like there are attractors in in the in the cosmos towards which our attention if we allow it can be um a drone or drawn or um directed and that we are not certainly the playthings of something pushing us from behind like like a like a um some kind of mechanism that has to have an efficient cause but we are for the main part pulled by things that are the contents of our mind and have qualities that are qualities that draw us to them that speak to us so I I see this process as being a reverberative one when yes we're making our own reality if you like but certainly not in the sense that post-modernists mean it when they say that we just make it all up and from the word go I'm very very clear that what I'm talking about is something that we help to bring about we Midwife and to experience something whose potential is there and what we choose to attend to and what we choose to bring about is governed by our experience here to four now if we've been brought up in a certain way with certain dogmas in a certain culture there are many things we won't see at all because our attention is never allowed to settle on them they don't speak to us because we're not even aware that they're there you know I do strongly believe that the faculty to understand something and see something is impaired by not being used and is enhanced by being used and when people who belong to certain um cultures such as the Aboriginal people of Australia say they can see things and hear things and and so forth that we can't who will be to say that they can't to hear and see these things yeah I am in in fact um you know I wrote a book called Roland and Moonlight which curiously enough is actually about mostly about that um but uh not about this well I mean actually Australian Aboriginal uh culture is mentioned in the book but but what I mean is precisely the the this matter of what is real and what is uh you know what we can see and what we can't and why well I mean look you mentioned Heidegger earlier um and uh is their ambiguities there of course um I don't mean just his own moral failings I mean in his understanding of of the history of nihilism um he wants to make this experience of an Faison so primordial experience in the western tradition that it's already being eclipsed by the end of the pre-socratic period um but there is a value in the notion of the genealogy of of of how we you know he doesn't talk in terms of Consciousness precise in part because he he starts with a phenomenological tradition that he's critiquing very early on in terms of factory City and all of that but then later because because of his fear of of lapsing into what he calls humanism which takes away the priority of of being in itself manifestation in us and so for him that on phase manifests itself for us first in language and only secondarily in our thinking about language or you know the result of which is that the the history of human consciousness or human knowledge or whatever for him becomes the history of Western philosophy so yeah the old joke the whole the whole story is 100 pound volume so he has this to my mind it absolutely correct Insight but he tries to separate it from a tradition that could have made better sense of it I mean by grossly uh simplifying say the platonic tradition or something and thinking that you really can reconstruct this story what he wants within a purely imminent frame which I don't think is possible I mean I think you simply have to do away with the concept of the boundaries between the imminent the Transcendent in the way which Consciousness engages the world because I think in a very basic level Consciousness is always already engaged with two poles that lie outside the continuum of nature as we'd like to construct it as a you know just the thing out there one is the unity of Consciousness within the the act itself which I can't be reduced to some sort of material composite is actually you know talk about you mentioned earlier when you're conscious we're conscious of being conscious and the Consciousness is a very curious thinking that it has some Aristotle notes this this is something where brentanda is very good the the Consciousness is always self-consciousness and so that it's always founded on itself and no matter how much you try to make subjective consciousness come to rest upon a purely physiological or physicalist uh Foundation by say well self-awareness is the result of a higher order perception or a higher order concept it always turns into an infinite regress you're never going to be able to situate uh that sort of subjective awareness in its share Unity of apprehension within a mechanical nature or nature simply as material composite but also Consciousness I think is always engaged necessarily with the transcendental Horizon that lies Beyond uh anything that can be represented so representations limits I mean representation is Possible only because there's a prior engagement with something that exceeds representation a more original participation you know we say the truth and really beautiful but whatever it is our mind reaches out toward that I mean this is basic intentionality that informs Consciousness and yet the question then becomes you know the degree to which it's you know I think you're right I mean a culture it's a person but also a culture very much can determine the degree to which we construe what lies between those two poles uh considered in themselves so to speak that that Oneness of subjectivity and that Trend the the transcendental Horizon that calls to it that's that defies reduction no matter how much effort we put into it but you know it doesn't come with all the rules in place and within that we can we can construct for ourselves any number of counterfeit realities uh you know they said well we live in a machine and it's amazing to my mind the degree to which this this which should be implausible to us on its face has become be regarded as the rational approach to reality where whereas you know this folder notion of this immediate participation this emotionally conscience the one that sees at large or that the experiences at large is dismissed as a kind of um uh you know as a kind of Wishy as a kind of fuzzy thinking um because because it seems to me the the the the narrative you know the the mechanistic narrative just fails on his face you know but you know there seems to be a kind of moral Pathos in your book in the sense that you you are saying you know we have to think about how we're thinking you know we have to um think about it see the world differently because we've closed our ourselves off from so much of it no no when I when I um when I was part way through conceiving um the master and his Emissary I came across this astonishing book by Louis sass called madness and modernism uh Insanity in the light of Modern Art literature and thought and what he shows very clearly and carefully is that there are over 20 different identifiable respects in which modernity seems to it have Incorporated the phenomena that I normally experienced only by subjects with a major mental illness such as schizophrenia and that was very interesting to me it set me off on what as you know in the second half of the mercenary's Emissary I thought well um obviously I didn't think that we'd all suddenly go up schizophrenia but what I did think was because that was my preoccupation at the time already I was looking at asymmetry in the brains of subjects with schizophrenia and it's very important to the way in which that condition develops and uh what I was thinking to myself was well it's not that we've all suddenly got a form of schizophrenia but that we've we've adopted a hyper left hemisphere um dominated position and are ignoring what the right hemisphere would tell us and this is this is a way of describing what happens in schizophrenia that the the left hemisphere becomes hypertrophied in its processes it's if you like sort of taken to an extreme and the counter veiling grounding in reality that would be provided by the right hemisphere disappears no and I thought well gosh if this is what's happening in our culture I started thinking about that maybe there were times when it was different there must have been times when it was different and so the second half of the master and his Emissary is the sort of review of um the history of ideas in the west really showing how I believe there were three moments at which coinciding with the sudden flourishing of a civilization when the left and right hemisphere worked in balance and Harmony um when I say balance of course I have to put in the caveat that the left hemisphere needs nonetheless to serve the right atmosphere but at least working in harmony with it and and then that in each case these Civilizations for some reason and the number of possible reasons I believe became uh if you like hypnotized by this left hemisphere take which is the one that helps you become powerful administer and get grab material um and in each case that Civilization died out and I think that is the situation that we we face at the moment but there are advantages because in the past we couldn't see that this is what is happening whereas now we can see what is happening and now I believe especially after the massive thing is I this may sound rather um hubristic thing to say but I I think it's a reasonable thing to say that I have added something to philosophical debate because after you've read the first part of the book where you see what happens to people's minds when they have parts of their right hemisphere missing in some way or not functioning you can see what the world comes to look like and it looks a lot like the world that there's always been a stream of philosophers seeing it in that way and that when you look if you if you look at the history of paradox and I have a whole chapter on Paradox as you know looking at the the main paradoxes that have intrigued academic philosophers for um hundreds of years that was interviewed what you can see in these is a conflict I believe and I I hope I've shown that between the right hemispheres way of seeing it and the left hemisphere's way of seeing it and in each case you can see that when there's a problem something extraordinary seems to follow from the logic that we know can't be right that's because of the espousal of the left hemisphere's take we know Achilles overtakes the tortoise there's no question about it that the argument that he can never actually even reach the tortoise is a product of a certain way of Serial analysis which is absolutely typical of the left hemisphere in which it doesn't understand the flowing process of time now if that's the case we can say when presented with two different schools if you like a philosophy and we say well you know this school thinks like this and this school thinks like that take your pick we don't have to just take our picks shrugging our shoulders and hoping for a 50 50. we can say this looks very like it's been driven by the left hemisphere and we know that the left hemisphere is less veridical I spend the first part of the book showing how it is less intelligent less insightful less intuitive and and less cognitively intelligent Ace is less perceives less attempt less it's only single Triumph is to be able to grab stuff and that it can do beautifully either in language or with the right hand now if that's the case have I not in some way given philosophy a tool to help guide it when it's looking at a construction of the world no one else no I mean I I think you have actually that's why we're having this conversation with a singular contribution to this regard um and as you say I mean the sort of the left hemispheric uh functions I think you demonstrate with it again Elegance but also comprehensiveness I I want to emphasize this so the the the the clinic the clinical data is richly represented in the tax but yeah I guess it is it is it is you know the mechanisms of power of course I mean you know so you know the project of of Western modernity starting with the search for purely inductive method in The Sciences is allied with a kind of Dogma that you know uh knowledge is power you know now this can be stated in an innocent what seemingly innocent way in which it means the more you know of something the more capable you are engaging with but but but that's not you know the in in the actual history and practice of of what became the West intellectual tradition over the next several centuries it was a it was also explicitly a claim regarding uh what What's what what the benefits what the advantages are of approaching nature in this way is a machine or is this was probably would say a standing reserve of resources to be exploited on each of Technology um yeah and and it is you know the will to power in a sense unfettered from a sense of existential Wonder a sense of the fullness of reality ambiguity the sense that one is participating at large in a greater reality to which one is in a sense already beholden and and and before which one could if a more sensible feel certain humility and a certain reverence all of this is is is very much the case and uh I I think you're right that it leads ultimately uh to a cultural Calamity but uh but of course in our time it is leading to all sorts of ancillary or larger you know because it seems almost unimaginable given the sort of damage we do to the world around us that that we could possibly think of ourselves as sane at the cultural level while we continue to pursue ends that that that obviously are so destructive that they under that they undermine the very premises of Life of our life not just of our culture civilization it's a curious I mean it it is a hypertrophy of a varying great power we possess and I think you're right philosophy I mean actually I think one of the more one of the most ingenious parts of your argument has to do with Paradox because I think there's there's a profound uh truth there the the the Paradox or apparent paradox is generated by this sort of overweaning will to serialize to divide yeah and uh your your Reflections on time and space in the second half of the of the of the later volume I think and and drawing on figures like you know I I have to confess a certain uh you know I I I'm terrifically susceptible to arguments drawn from shelling in purse and William James and others yeah so we seem to um seem to have similar tastes there but also I mean the the the the it just seems as obviously the case that um yeah that that the Paradox itself is generated within a framework that that that demands to be dominant that understands itself as reason as such but that in fact exists only because uh it is curtailed other kinds of Consciousness other kinds of approaches to reality and and as narrowed the focus of of of its operation in very specific yes very artificial ways again that was the project of early modern science you're trying to get away from yes Notions of formal and final causality and just concentrate on momentum mechanism you know Mass properties that can be Quantified without reference to a greater context I mean Quantified not even qualitatively not you know weight doesn't become the weight we feel we're just going to deal with mass you know in relation to the forces that act upon mass and again it is it is the language of power it is it has created you know I mean I I I would think we would be fools to Lament The Great accomplishments of modern medicine and things that were hastened yeah you know as again this is not a man your books are not a mannequin story about a wicked hemisphere a good hemisphere absolutely it's about yes mind and reality uh it's not just a proportional understanding Harmony of the hemispheres it's it's harmism our understanding of consciousness of the reality we inhabit that there is a peaceful medium there that there is um and uh I find that there are a couple of things that people want from my story they want me to to be able to say that one hemisphere is good and the other one's bad that's because it wouldn't like it when it heard the answer but the the um it might you know you can say with the perverse little imp is like yeah no and the left hemisphere is enormously important and and serviceable as long as it remains Guided by the overall review of the right hemisphere that is the Proviso the single Proviso that enables it to work well um and it seems at times to forget this if we can personify the the the relationship in that way and the other thing is people want me to say that if there are two things they must be equal but I I find that they're not and and this is in keeping with the rest of the world in which I find that no two things are ever equal so these are the various um fantasies that we've we've started to to live with and I want to say that rule is the perfect equilibrium is perfect in their inertia is it's death you know process has to be asymmetrical otherwise there's no way it has it has to be and that's right well that what what I that's what I call reverberative relations in which each affects the other reciprocally and so forth but but one thing I I want to make clear is that I absolutely do not think that there's something wrong with science or something wrong with reason I rely on them both massively as you know but I think there may be something going wrong with our science and there may be something going wrong with our use of reason because when the left hemisphere is the dominant party what happens is science becomes dogmatic and exclude certain things on principle no there can't be purpose there can't be valued there can't be subjectivity can't be relevant and that is not scientific that is not based on anything other than a Prejudice right and the reason two can become degraded by becoming dogmatism it can become um rationalism rather than true reason which is a kind of wisdom in which all one's life experience and one's ability to think logically are brought together to bear on a situation so what I see is that because of this shift towards the left hemispheres take science and reason are suffering as much as anything and intuition and Imagination are being almost excluded from the picture altogether because in their case the right hemisphere plays a very important role so as it does in science and in in and in reason so the right hemisphere is the more important part of all of those four paths towards an understanding of the world and I use that I suppose in the last part of the book where I then talking about so what is the cosmos like and what's it made of um I'm using what we've learned in the first part of that book to apply that to these simple problems like the nature of time and space and consciousness well I mean you know actually though I mean I will say this um I think the the really the greatest scientific minds of the past few centuries end of our own actually understand of our own time understand this better than science you know the ideologists of scientism do exactly exactly the truth is you can quote and you do in your book and we all any number of physicists to begin with OR where you know the breaker the mechanical as the mechanical picture breaks down um physicists in general uh uh show a greater willingness to think toward a different kind of Paradigm um the resistance to this is ideological more than that yes and one of the things so we I don't want to keep talking about Danette we mentioned him but we can mention like uh Stephen Pinker or very dogmatic near darwinians um that's very interesting because because the life sciences have have discovered all sorts of fascinating things over the past 70 years that should excite the scientific imagination but in some cases confront a resistance that's really obviously doctrinaire rather than critical um but I I would once again say with you that the really great minds are the ones who can see that and are open to it but you know second-rate science is closed-minded and dogmatic and simply says well I'm not entertaining any of this and unfortunately the situation in physics made it just untenable to carry on like that and it's beginning to get like that in the Life Sciences but I imagine you enjoyed um if you didn't already know it um learning about the um book length study that's been made of Nobel Prize winners I quote in the chapter on the center of the Sacred that if you look at people who've won Nobel prizes over the last 123 years the um in the humanities um if you ask them whether they've at any stage in their lives being atheistic 33 say yes when you come into the Sciences it's fewer it's something like nine percent in biology um seven percent in Chemists in chemistry and it's 4.7 in physics in other words 95.3 percent of all physicists never at any time in their lives were atheistic or even agnostic according to the way the questionnaire was set up well I mean it's something that with Schrodinger and Addington so it's almost I can't remember the quotation but it's almost done there comes a point when when the attempt to uh exclude Consciousness as a foundation of of reality it involves excluding reality absolutely the the you've absolutely find that there's an inseparability there that that goes beyond uh merely the conventional notice not the representation was us that we we construct our reality internally but rather the the entire structure of of reality uh has has about it first of all kind of implaus ability but also uh a kind of uh Inseparable relationship to our consciousness of it that just makes it almost um an almost meaningless to to try to construe the physical world as we know it now purely in terms of mechanical processes they simply aren't there they themselves um I mean well I mean of course at systems level you can do would you investigators take it with the life sciences you can at a systems level EU can break things down into their mechanical causes but but but you can't break down the system into mechanism this is the problem it there's a kind of a deherent hierarchy that that that that appears at every level the the of of life that presumes as much the top down as the bottom-up exactly and pure physicalism has to be able to reverse the Quant the equation of causality from bottom up to top down and that's simply not the case in the way life is actually organized there there are formal realities that simply won't uh will allow themselves to be subjected to that kind of reduction you mentioned to me recently uh the debate between Dennis and Obel and Richard Dawkins at uh I think it was how the line gets it and what was interesting I went and looked at the debate what you told me about what was interesting about it was I mean they're very polite to one another oh and uh politeness being one of the the the uh virtues that the British have taken to an extreme the English especially uh it sometimes can obscure certain things from view so they're very because they can also be very rude the English unit yes they've taken taken that to an extreme as well the English are the most marvelously contradictory and I say this yes you know I I have pure British diaspora and I'm married to an English woman for over 30 years but the English could be either for the most imaginative or the most unimaginative people on Earth but nothing in between it sometimes seems just it's either Lewis Carroll or Richard Dawkins you know I mean is it or or they can be the point to the point almost of of obsessive uh politeness or they could be rude with with it with a with a savagery that would that would have uphold uh the the Visigoths their eyes over the uh you know um but anyway what was it I'm sorry you what you brought that up because you were talking about Dawkins and yeah but yes the debate as you watched it of course is the Dennis Noble actually won the debate on points because he was dealing with the current state of what we know about the structure of life I mean we we as I mentioned Barbara McClintock earlier well that started a whole you know something that that um now I don't think we can look away from I mean we we see the degree to which intentional structures in life would go all the way down to the cellular level and all the way up uh to the phenotype and and then in a sense uh uh dictate the entire relationship between organism and environment to a degree that such intricacy and such precision and and but again such intentional in your book actually you you've drawn a lot of the same people I think that you know those interesting James Shapiro and Dennis Noble and persons of that who have um yes the cell itself uh exhibits um is intelligent yes exhibits intelligence and intentional intelligence um yeah I mean it was 50 years before Barbara McClintock was actually given the Nobel Prize for her work at first she was ridiculed uh but but uh you know the discovery that uh with the wise men barrier is a myth that uh that that sells actively edit their own genome uh through incredibly intricate um sense of of what's going on in their environment what's going on in the organism coordinate that but they're lateral transfer of genetic materials all sorts of things that and the degree to which I think you know we understand life now has a semiotic complexity to it um that that can't be accounted for by the mechanical Power because of course you know that's that that would be excluded by a by a properly mechanistic reduction uh that by which I mean that that what goes on in um you know anyway well in this debate I mean I saw Dennis Noble talking about about what organisms actually do based on very good clinical evidence and Richard Dawkins was talking about Gene frequencies in populations over evolutionary history but of course that's not an answer that's the very question we're trying to address what what what does that mean and not really dealing with the degree to which DNA is is fairly inert macro molecular whatever it is goes I was just going to say I think the one thing goes as far as says it's very hard to find a more inert molecule than yeah he's probably making making a point but he makes it well yeah but yes uh you know this being a curious curve in the progress of biology because if you go back to the beginning of the century not so far in time in fact somewhat before Rutherford in physics you've got people like um John haldane the father of JBS holding and then his his son JBS and Conrad Hal Waddington and um from bertolanfi in Austria all these people um having a much more sophisticated philosophy of the living which is an organic philosophy and I think what happened was it was the discovery of you know being able to do microscopic engineering to a molecule that that started us thinking oh it's mechanical and and it's we're now fundamentally recovering for that after about 50 years but the the um the point I think that's worth making here is that a system that is not just complicated like a machine but complex is fundamentally unpredictable is fundamentally self-organizing and the level at which you look at it makes a difference to what you find so for example in a very very complex system you can always isolate as long as you go minutely enough a simple simple cause and effect chain somewhere in this massive complex absolutely and you can intervene there you can make a difference and bingo you see that something has changed the way you wanted it to that makes you take or make some people take a completely unauthorized step from the fact that at the most limited level there are cause and chain effects I think the whole thing is understood as it went from the bottom up um by a set of chords and chain effects in other words the architecture of what it is as in the machine is the whole story but it it within a living organism it's not just the syntax it's the semantics as well right and in a machine I want to point out not only do you not have the semantics in the machine you don't even actually have the syntax a machine can only to the it's a mechanism can only uh can only uh simulate uh a syntax that's actually capable of semantic content um that's why you know a computer does not actually con contain any syntax uh in its in its programming any more than it does semantics uh it contains notations binary notations that yes serious syntax and and so there'd be you know a machine is not going to reproduce itself right it's not going to pass all its its code but it's also not not going to be capable of novelty and development and general regeneration and regeneration and growth and all the at a coordinated level Because unless we can construct a machine that can um we could we could construct a machine again that simulate if we were like Gods about our technical ability they would simulate these things but we we still would not be uh producing anything other than uh um a kind of a a kind of mechanical allegory of a process that that will not be mechanized yes I mean going back to syntax it depends um in which sense you mean it of course in the full sense of syntax that we understand various relationships between things and use them in a conscious way that that can't be carried out going to be as it were simulated by the machine but I just meant like a book of rules as it were I think yeah yeah so yeah having the syntax doesn't give you the semantic contact it does not but his later argument was I should point out that he he even broke with the the uh the the notion that there was a syntax there as well so yeah the Book of Rules but the book of rules in reality I mean it's fine to use syntax the way we we used it to begin with I'm just saying that in reality you can't in the notion of a syntax that's separate from a semantic economy from a semiological or fully divided ultimately is right yeah but no I know what you mean yes and we can mechanize processes that achieve remarkable things these large language models for instance are getting more and more um yeah sophisticated [Laughter] I mean the the degree I mean what they bring home to one is that this machine doesn't understand obviously yeah understanding is something that only an embodied being with a life and a Consciousness and someone can can do but it's simulations are dangerously close to something that people feel oh this actually is an intelligent response that I've got here and what what's very worrying is of course well there's so many things to worry about in relation to it but one is that it actually makes stuff up because it seems to fit so um the numerous ways in which it will attack truth in our society is uh you can fear it doing it will do it will attack trust and that's why it will attack community and trust is the last thing that you can let go you know everything else but you mustn't let go of trusted you don't have a society but one can never trust with this thing and and whether it's hoodwinking um people in in education or in the law or in politics or wherever or just in day-to-day life it's it's well I mean yeah I mean we've always something I don't want to contemplate well I mean we're already aware even before this this technology began appearing in in quite So Sophisticated form we were aware of the degree to which algorithms could be created that create chains of Association that lead yes a person from a relatively Anodyne interest in something in passing to becoming obsessed with all sorts of lies that he or she takes to be true the the that you know it's it's um uh of agrius politicus used to talk about uh the logisme you know the uh the way in which a chain of associations can carry the Mind away towards Pure Fantasy or pure distraction uh because it's just the way Consciousness works it has a has a sort of fluid uh equality that that seeks the next entailment not be precisely because it's not causal but but but but uh or there's a semantic continent well that was powerful enough as an algorithm at a very at the ins that social media use I think that with AI of this sort with large language models as you say you can make up things that that process will be become you know incalculably more efficient and more accurate um you know it will um acquire very plausible sort of rationales not just associations but rationales linking one thing to another so that you go from you know you start with uh with an Italian cooking site and you end up in a you know white supremacist website and somehow you've gotten there um well you know I mean just uh I I've tried to say it sounds absurd but I'm beginning to think that there is uh there's a kind of pliancy of Consciousness in that regard especially when it's become unmoored from the sort of deeper engagement in reality that that uh yes there are big questions about the nature of attention in the modern world and its constant derailment um by Smashing Brad braids made on our attention all the time if we use electronic media and particularly social media and I believe that they you know no important creative work or deep thought can be done without some continuous uh concentrated thoughts and I don't know that people are going to be capable of that in the future this is actually something that I worry about more than I ought to simply because of course being mortal it's uh you know I'm not going to be around to to have any say in them but but I see it I mean it actually it manifests itself or if you've if you've taught undergraduates in recent years you see that there's been a disastrous fragmentation of attention spans and attention span of course we're already using the language there in a quantitative way that suggests this matter simply a matter of like but it's not it's a matter of continuities it's a matter of of the flow of of a thought that's inspired by a final calls taking as I I'm quite happy with the Aristotelian language I mean it's it's aiming towards understanding something that it apprehends but doesn't yet fully I mean there's no should faith-seeking understanding in a sense I think is the structure of all consciences the faith not in a the sense of just a uh an exertion of the will but faith in the sense of this initial sense of an immediacy of communion between Consciousness and being seeking to uh in in forms that are at once rational and poetic and affective and then yes taking every dimension of understanding is that that kind of continuity is precisely what I think not only this technology but the the culture at large as a ceaseless engine of distraction from distraction uh renders us incapable and I see students who you know um When I Was An undergraduate you know well both American Britain we use blue books you know to for exams yeah three hour exam you'd fill three or four blue books um you know now uh three hours can pass and you get back at Blue Book in which two or three pages uh at most have been filled with fragmentary and and you realize that um the students in a sense through no fault of their own I mean they've been made complicit in their own stupid faction uh because these devices are so fascinating and so beguiling but they're not capable of understanding what they read continuously or or thinking continuously with it and at some level I don't think they are aware of what it is that's missing it really is everything that's the ability to partial moments of you know partial aspects of a whole that doesn't exist yes this problem that you don't know what it is that you don't know is I mean it's always been a problem but it seems particularly pressing at the moment because I do think that people will very soon no longer remember the existence Obsession ways of being or thinking of doing that perhaps you and I can still remember and our lives have been rooted in and they will disappear and it will be in place I think we're also a bit perversely out of step with the time maybe in in you know many people are I mean it's not just what one remembers it's also sometimes you're what's being left behind absolutely but I think there's no great virtue in being in the Vanguard rushing into um crazy um the abyss yes into the abyss I think one you know when there's change there's a 50 50 chance it will be for the better um not more than that and therefore just because something is new it is not a good enough reason to embrace it you need to know more about it and see it for a while before you decide whether you're going to opt for it or not but this is absolutely not the way we work now people not knowing what they don't know though that in a sense given your analysis of the way that we use I'm not going to say the way the hemisphere is the way we we as persons as organisms think with the brain is it that is the Right hemispheric View we do know what we don't know in a sense because we have the sort of primordial apprehension of the whole yeah absolutely but that is a fundamental difference between also informs yeah of the range of mystery that we haven't yet um exactly where is the lifetime is yeah I mean when you're thinking with the left hemisphere you think you know it all right and we know that people who think they know it all are the the most stupid people highly intelligent and perceptive people are aware of how much they don't know and the right hemisphere is like that so it's open to something beyond what it knows and that opens the door to things like modesty or and compassion which if we could get these back into our world we might actually not um need to be um facing extinction because I think it sounds very small thing to avoid hubris to adopt a more humble position it sounds simple to think that always very important but these these things are they have effects on how we approach the world they're of central importance and they can be cultivated as soon as we stop telling ourselves we understand everything we know everything we you know we've got it all figured out no I I mean entirely I mean that that uh I I think I used at the beginning of this conversation the word reverence and I wasn't I don't mean it in in the sort of uh simple devotional sense that the you know one has taught been taught um how to behave in church on Sundays what I mean is that uh that there's a fundamental moral comportment towards the world that starts with the notion that there is before me something of singular mystery singular Beauty and singular worth in every person in every living thing and every question I encounter I can't reduce to a matter of instrumental control and the moment I begin thinking in terms instead of the desire or or in fact reduce you know my world of values to the desire to to exercise that sort of instrumental control over my world and over other persons or you know treat others simply as an occasion for profit or uh Power then of course I've become a sociopath and I've become a psychotic you know and that there is uh you spoke earlier schizophrenia but I mean I was also saying the the part of the the there's a deep socio sociopathy at a deep you know in in a culture that's constructed in this way I mean in fact I think actually in some regards uh America surpasses the world in in in to a degree in this notion of the you know the rational calculus of value is is monetary uh you know his material um yes that that we uh equated human Liberation with uh you know understandably you know we understand the period which uh the Revolutionary projects of the 18th century emerged but nonetheless um that there is a um you know I I think um that you're right that that you know we we have to think uh about how we think about how uh how we're oriented towards the world in the terms you've provided I think are very helpful I agree entirely the philosophers should take that especially since you know I uh you know I believe in God I believe in the soul but I'm not a Cartesian I believe that the the that that everything at some level is consciousness is mind including this organism which is which is a series of intentional and formal realities Made Concrete everything about me and the world I'd have it is mind like in its basic structure and the mind isn't simply an emergent epiphenomenon of a Mindless or dead world um and and so it's perfectly you know perfectly it's not it doesn't require any physicalist or materialist reduction on mice I think that yes the way we can Port ourselves to reality really does have something to do with how we live within the physiology of our bodies and brains and I think that that uh that uh the the sort of picture you've presented of the way the the the hemispheres function being much richer and more complex and much more Illuminating uh than the way the the sort of the earlier the more popular pictures of this hitherto have presented it uh actually gives it a moral weight uh you know there there there's a sort of there's a kind of moral challenge in the book about you know you are not required to see life in this way and the way in which we have elected in a sense or the way we've become habituated to saying it uh is is a way of is the way of death we start with the notion of a dead of a dead Universe in which life is a kind of simple biochemical convention so that death is the prior reality and life is the exception and curiously enough that's where we're heading in terms of the way we treat life yes I completely agree as you'll be surprised a lot and and that matter of how we dispose our attention is a moral one because it has such consequences so what's the importance of the Arts as well you know I I I um something you write about as well [Music] um quite moving later times I say that you love music this reminds me of uh some years ago Stephen Pinker who is himself uh a perfect example of what can happen to an otherwise intelligent man who who can't find the door uh out of his left atmosphere uh you know had had an argument about the the contributions The Sciences could make to the humanity he said which it turned out that for him the unders you know the the the the scientists could Advance our appreciation of poetry through these sort of statistical models of What kinds of words and images computers could have a sort of physiological affective it was all reduced to Pure uh and of course this led to a debate with uh at the time Simon Simon wiesenthal uh V isn't here sorry vessel tier not Visa that would be something yes yes um and I I also um had a reply to make to that same piece I think it was in the Los Angeles review of books or whatever wasn't it um and I I can't remember now but I think it's on my website uh in which I'm respond to Stephen Pinker who I I've never actually met but I I always um rather like the man and think that he's he's enormously um intelligent and on to interesting things some of the time but otherwise intelligent uh person yes he uh yes he he has not a not a gifted historian to judge from his two big books has this uh rather uh for say uh coarse grained understanding of the history of human thought and culture but yeah no I mean his his work on the modular brain and all it's it's um I'm not I don't want to dismiss him as such but it is it was to me curious the the that it never occurred to him that there could be any other way of understanding what's going on in the Arts the notion that these actually this is itself um an approach to an understanding of of of being of reality um not without which you can't have wisdom yeah no I mean it just seems that this but again it's one of those things you have to know you have to experience and if you've trained yourself not to experience it then then uh you what you don't feel I mean one of the things I think that that we're always apprised of when we're really seized uh with Wonder or Delight before uh a work of art you know the the that resists reduction to simple explanation but nonetheless is that there's a certain sort of surface there that goes beyond merely the object and the occasion of it of the the gratuity of it um and and the way in which it gives us a dimension of reality that on the one hand is is novel and creative and new but on the other hand seems to point us towards us those transcendental ends I mentioned before is an experience that without which I think you do become so you can very easily become a kind of moral idiot um you know that that your nature absolutely requires that to be in touch with reality as something before which you have to be humble to which you you feel an obligation uh and in which you find your your own fullest reality your own fulfillment um and I would say that when you when you say quite rightly that there's something about a work of art that is gratuitous super abundant I think this is a special case of all creativity including the creative urge that founds the cosmos I often think that you know life is just gratuitous super abundant self-delighting um self-understanding self-complexifying um living entity and and you know that that's I'm just picking up what you're seeing there I think is a reflection of the very business of creation than which we cannot go more deeply because everything that we can know is part of this creation you know my first book was a Theology of beauty by the way I would rewrite radically now but it but uh yeah interesting yeah well I mean I I as as and I'm glad you you talk about life in that way I mean I I think also the base point that that that life is a gift not the problem there's also an ecstatic structure yeah I mean it does have this intentionality and that I mean I think another fellow writes on you know the the new state of of the life sciences and who puts an emphasis in terms of evolution puts an emphasis on homeostasis as as a sort of central mechanism as Jay Scott Turner uh and uh and he he talks quite a lot about life as advancing through a kind of delight a kind of creativity that you know that uh that the the one of the reasons he finds the the Orthodox neo-darwinian synthesis inadequate for one thing it's implausible I mean the the tiny beneficial mutations if they even exist uh simply selected in this way through the the barrier between the genome and the organism that's impenetrable uh is almost an impossibly uh um you know impo it's just would there be enough time and even in an infinite Universe you know but but also because he sees in the structure the way life modifies itself and not only modifies itself in reaction to its environment but creates an environment in which it then becomes something new which it recreates its ecology to create the context for its own creative expression is that exactly the term vitalism not in the 19th century sense of an extrinsic property called life infused into immaculate it doesn't mean that he means vitalism in the sense that EV that you know life mind is is the foundation uh there is no such thing as dead matter for one thing but but also that what life is doing is an ecstatic and artistic movement towards uh an end that it glimpses but in a sense understands by creating yes in other words it comes into being through a conversation or a correspondence or a reverberation or whatever you'd like to call it but a a two-way continual intercourse between the the thing that is and what it can conceive of as potential to bring into existence so it's it's um it is a self-fulfilling self-deliving self-understanding process that requires no extra push from behind that's why the word vitalism is is such a worry isn't it when used naively because it suggests that there needs to be something extra put in for the world to to live but I don't mean the Cartesian Soul you know that's not no no no but I mean it's I I was very struck by the um the work of Robert Rosen and his vision of life in his work life itself and essays on life itself that that life is is the norm if you see what I mean not the statistical Norm but that what exists is life and that inanimacy is never total because Mata always has this essential um what Everyone likes to call it that means that it's not dead it's not dead well yes that's right but you know instead of thinking that inanimacy is is it and that's the norm and then there's this curious aberration in Rich life comes along life is as it were the norm getting away completely from the idea of the statistical magnitude of whatever there is um and that if it could be completely done away with then you would reach asymptotically the the fully inanimate I think it was um John poking horn who pointed out and I thought this was a very good point that when people say how if life is what the cosmos is about um it's an extraordinarily extravagant project well of course I've got nothing against it being an extravagant project but but um you know why would it make this huge Cosmos that is according to some people just dead and and his argument was it needed a universe of almost exactly the size that it is um to be able to sustain life at any place within it yeah no I mean that's this Point's been made um by number of persons from here yes I'm sure but I'm not even willing to Grant the picture that what's out there is dead um you know obviously because yourself pointed out in the book that that it's no good talking simply about a kind of Proto by uh biology or or a sort of and Galen strawson is you know yeah so when it comes to Consciousness is that is that in some sense if the potential is there then the actuality has to be it becomes meaningless if you think of potential as something that still has to undergo some kind of miraculous transformation to be actualized that's that in some sense discontinuous with its own uh intrinsic nature you know so um no it's not discontinuous but of course it has to take a different nature when it becomes actual it doesn't do it I I think an example for me or I go into that in a perhaps not a very Illuminating way but at some length relationship between potential and actuality is somewhat like the relationship between the wave function and whatever it is we mean by the particles as it were it collapses into this actuality of the particle but the potential is is that it's still there actually in the particle as well so um what we're talking about is the bringing in bringing about of something that always has existence in potentia yeah yeah I don't mean that's you know that's what potential must mean but but the thing is one has to make that point though it's an obvious point one has to make that that point now clear because otherwise um people find it hard to to make a distinction between that and the emergent narrative which is is a sort of self-defeating logically self-defeating way of trying to reduce either life or Consciousness to to back to a mechanical ground I think as I mean there are other I mean there are other uh people uh at least the philosophy of the life sciences like Evan Thompson and Terence death trying to close this gap between the structure of life and the structure of Consciousness they still tend to want even then when speaking of their potential to speak of of complex life and Consciousness almost as a kind of emergence that's the result of uh the nagantropic qualities of life and how they create the order or there's a physicist named Eric chaseon who's done a whole book of and so while I like the general drift of the thought the problem is is quite often I think they uh they still don't sufficiently understand the degree to which Consciousness really has to be Consciousness you know even at the ground that is that um you know they tend to think in terms of structures that come into being as a result of entropic processes that are far from equilibria and being far from equilibrium become complex and that you know they want to see life being generated out of this to some degree and they don't mind talking about teleotomy and intention at a certain level but they still want to get from the just nakantropic to the living and to my mind this problem is that is that that you're and this Traverse Chase on it as well that that they're starting with geometrical complexity in a sense and still leaving out the semiotic because obviously as Rich already the intentionality of life is written would be literally written in the cells in a way that I don't think is accounted for simply by by talking about uh structures Rising far from equilibrium uh in front of the problems yes the the um one of the problems is that to have life at all that needs to be a mechanism of transcription right and for there to be a and that's you know the eigen threshold but in fact for there to be a mechanism of transcription there needs to be something already more complex to bring about this um mechanism of transcription so this is an imponderable chicken and egg problem there and to say that it happened by chance I can't remember the exact figure but it absolutely the the chances against it are massively smaller than one in the number of cybertonic particles in the entire known universe and this comes from or you can uh or Eugene property um I imagine he's an American coonan um who who's um you know a government scientist but then that's right the these um gestures towards um emergencies and now another miracle happens you know um but I think the Consciousness can evolve myself so I think that for example your Consciousness is different from the consciousness of a rosebud so I think that I think of that yes yeah I think the difficulty is going from an unconscious Universe into one with Consciousness and that that's a completely different kind of problem and cannot be magic away by this kind of sleight of hand you might though wonder if the the another way though of saying there's not so much the Consciousness evolves as different organic ways of participating in Consciousness evolve um you know that is um on the one hand I mean what I'm afraid of is reducing Consciousness to a property that is in the way that say uh I think that they don't mean to but Christoph Coke and Julio tanani when their their version of uh of integrated information Theory rests on a kind of pan psychism but it's a pen psychism in which there's a kind of University in the use of the word information so it's you know how much information this contains is also in a sense somehow the Quantum of its Consciousness and then qual and Consciousness comes to seem like some kind of physical property that becomes composite uh in in higher uh in higher concentrations and I think that's wrong I mean I think there that you're just um uh you know the the Consciousness isn't a property the Consciousness is always an act and it's and so there's always a degree of intentionality a degree of of subjectivity that but that that life so I mean I and you and I as I'm certainly not imposing this on you because you talk about it in late and you're in uh a matter of things um understanding consciousness of that sort of that William James said to that dark Subterranean uh Unity that we share that uh you know the different different forms as different modalities of participation in the in that ground spring up and they have their unique modes of Consciousness I mean the way in which an octopus is conscious is very different from the way I am but I'm quite sure that we're both conscious um but I don't know if I think that that so much that human consciousness [Applause] I I want to be careful here the the the the the I mean yes Consciousness evolves in the sense of the the the the integrated organic structure knowledge and living navigating but in another level I want to insist the the it's always all there already no I would agree with that yeah no no I wouldn't I wouldn't disagree with that so but I didn't mean that somehow bits were added on to Consciousness I think like that no no as I said I'm not interesting I want to make sure that I understand that yes yeah and you do you draw on James and you draw on Paris and uh yeah shelling yes and so here's here's a question says I suppose we should be wrapping up soon because it's because I just looked up it again once again I always plan these things to be no more than 90 minutes and they always hit two hours at least because I have this bad habit of talking only to really interesting people you know yeah so what do you say do fairies exist I'm quite serious so this is a this is a question you talked about you know assuming that what we can't see isn't there when others can because aren't habituated to seeing reality as as we do so we don't have to talk about fairies necessarily but it is true I mean that there are these accounts you mentioned uh Australia Aboriginal but others uh uh I think it's Wilford fessinger I'm talking once about a time among the Kalahari um being aware of things in a great distance than a hunting party that's right yeah things like and uh yeah that's right and our temptation is say sometimes to dismiss this is oh well it's a new age but I don't think that's true I mean I think it's just just something that happens with or or something very simple something our friend we have a shared friend you and I Sally Vickers she and I have talked to synchronicity in our in our correspondence we also have a way our thoughts converging at The Identical moment on something for no particular reason yes yes yes so well I've never looked into these things in any detail so I haven't equipped myself to pronounce on them really but I'm I'm I'm aware of enough examples that would take a hell of a lot of explaining away yeah that are common in cultures other than our own where people regularly are able to see at a distance I think seeing at a distance I don't know whether in in time is more problematic although it may happen but seeing it a distance in space does seem to happen and I I have no idea how this happens but um at large in something you know if um each of us is only a participant in a larger yes I sometimes sort of use the image of us each being like some out pouching or pseudo Podium of a cell and and that 98 of us is surrounded by a membrane it's only at the foot of the of this of the pseudopod or out pouching of the cell or Villas or whatever you like to call it there is a connection between us and the main cytoplasm and so if you get used to seeing where where isolated in this what appears to be a vesicle then we think we're completely cut off but in fact unusually and for some people they may be able to cultivate it we can actually communicate with other parts of reality so I I wouldn't um by any means rule that out what happens is that I must be an enormously dull person but now um truly um paranormal or or or super natural things have ever ever occurred to me well I've had a few experiences but they've often been boring nonetheless you know they've been you know experiences but but you know nothing really Earth change Earth shaking one or two of considerable importance personally but otherwise but yeah no I I uh I think uh that was that's the last point I'd make is that that in reading the book your your most recent book I did have this thought that um well one of the the dimensions of humility we have to learn in the modern world in the modern West is that it's more than sentimentality to take seriously these other cultures that we often think we've left behind in terms of rationality and Enlightenment and realize that there are many things that the narrowing of the our Focus as has closed us all from that really are there and that we should that we have we have a lot to learn uh we have and we need to learn quite quickly from cultures that know things that are different from us before we have turned them into carbon copies of ourselves which alas so we're doing yeah well I'm going to stop oh sorry God very good no I was just going to say it's been lovely talking with you stop the recording don't hang up quite I have one thing to ask something else but yeah no thanks for doing this um I I started these conversations in order to break myself out of the boredom of just just writing in my own voice all the time for some sex so yeah things like this are actually a great treat for me so thank you

Channel: Leaves in the Wind

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Length: 119min 46sec (7186 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023